For Whom, from What?

Published date01 March 2012
Date01 March 2012
AuthorWilfrid Greaves
DOI10.1177/002070201206700115
Subject MatterComing Attractions
| International Journal | Winter 2011-12 | 219 |
Wilfrid Greaves
For whom, from
what?
Canada’s Arctic policy and the narrowing of human security
Since its inception in the 1990s, human security has become a signif‌icant,
perhaps def‌ining, aspect of Canadian foreign policy. Canada is credited with
propagating a unique approach to human security by exercising international
leadership on multiple high-prof‌ile policy initiatives. Many observers have
noted that human security provides the most consistent unifying framework
for Canadian foreign and security policy in the post-Cold War era. Some
have gone further, suggesting it is the “central pillar,” “political leitmotif,”
or “ethical guide” of Canada’s global engagement over the past two decades.1
Though debates continue over the signif‌icance, eff‌icacy, and desirability
Wilfrid Greaves is a PhD candidate in the department of political science at the University
of Toronto.
1 Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon, “Canada’s human security agenda: Walking the talk?”
International Journal 60, no. 4 (autumn 2005): 1067-92; Sascha Werthes and David
Bosold, “Caught between pretension and substantiveness: Ambiguities of human
security as a political leitmotif,” in Tobias Debiel and Sascha Werthes, eds., Human
Security on Foreign Policy Agendas: Changes, Concepts, and Cases (Duisberg: Institute for
Development and Peace, 2006); and Rosalind Irwin, “Linking ethics and security in
Canadian foreign policy,” in Rosalind Irwin, ed., Ethics and Security in Canadian Foreign
Policy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001).
COMING ATTRACTIONS
| 220 | Winter 2011-12 | International Journal |
| Wilfrid Greaves |
of incorporating human security into Canadian foreign policy—many in
the pages of International Journal—there is general agreement that it has
been central to Canada’s post-Cold War global role, and that many foreign
policy successes in that time have been prominently labelled human security
achievements.
The generally positive response to Canada’s human security agenda
does, however, obscure conceptual and practical challenges that attend how
Canada has def‌ined and approached human security. Unlike holistic human
security frameworks employed by other actors, the Canadian approach
is characterized by a focus on the prevention of violent harms to foreign
human subjects. By marginalizing the socioeconomic and intersubjective
dimensions of human wellbeing that are central to holistic human security,
the Canadian approach ignores the radical reconceptualization of security
that forms the core of human security studies. Moreover, by emphasizing
the def‌initive role of violence, the Canadian conceptualization privileges
the state and its institutions because of the former’s monopoly on the
legitimate use of violence within modern politics. A def‌initional emphasis
on violence results in a practical emphasis on states, displacing people
from the analytical centre of human security. In practice, therefore, the
Canadian approach retains a state-centrism and conceptual narrowness that
undermine employing people as the referent objects of security analysis.
Why does the Canadian approach abandon the radicalism of holistic
human security, and what are the implications for conditions of human
(in)security on the ground? Examining Canada’s current Arctic policy, I
argue that the Canadian approach supports elitist and state-centric security
discourse and practice while minimizing the emancipatory potential
inherent in holistic human security. It does this by viewing human security
as a central plank of foreign, not domestic, policy, and by employing a
violence-centric def‌inition that excludes from the scope of its analysis
the most pressing insecurities in the Canadian north. The result is the
marginalization of hazards that most affect the people who actually inhabit
the region in favour of statist, militarized representations of insecurity
generated by southern Canadian policymakers. In the context of the
Canadian Arctic, narrow human security also reproduces structural relations
of dominance and subordination between the federal and territorial orders of
government, while failing to mitigate—indeed, contributing to—conditions
of insecurity for northern peoples and communities. Current Arctic policy
thus exemplif‌ies a preference for militarism and legalism similar to that
found in the Canadian approach to human security.

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